Ok this is just something that came across my desk earlier today. I thought I'd share it with you to give ideas for possible runs.

With the market going crazy, gold is up massively over the last few months. now over $900 US per ounce, but I would not say to invest in gold. that means you're buying something you need to hold and sell before it drops, and it will drop. The real money is to be made in the guys who are mining it. So where to put the money? in the next month- Australian or Canadian mining?

Why? well the people mining it will still be showing a profit and the value of the companies is more reliable than what they produce.

Why Canadian or australia? (and here we're heading in to the run stuff.) there's apparently a fuel shortage in south africa and the gold mines have been lying stagnant for the last 2 weeks without fuel to run their machinery. estimates are that it will be 2-4 weeks until they're back and running, unless things go wrong then it could be as many as 6 weeks. So while panicy investors stupidly head for hard gold, the value or mining companies will be well up trying to meet the demand, especially so with Debeers and friends out of the running.

Rumanian gold is also available for the same reasons but that's more risky. Their quality control is suspect at best-anyone remember that big cyanide spill in the danube a few years back? and they might seriously screw up again if they get greedy.pushing harder might produce more but push it too hard and they have a complete break down that will put them out for longer than Debeers.

I've heard this sort of advice before (although I don't play the market except through my TSP, and that doesn't give me that degree of granularity when investing).

You mentioned NOT investing in gold though. Could you expound on why? In a world of 'managed currencies', whether the dollar or the nuyen, doesn't it make sense to invest heavily in something which will never really lose its physical value? Or is the idea that the current rate of inflation means more people are looking to invest in tangibles, driving the price unnaturally high?

I haven't trended Gold's value in Euros over the last 18 months, but has the price inflated overly or is it merely the weakness of the dollar showing through?

Heh, I noticed those advertisments on tv and it's my rule of thumb if they are already advertising it on tv that means the price is high and they're unloading it, so don't buy it.

At over $900/ounce it's way high. It hasn't been this high in a while. The odds of it staying this high are negligible. As people get more confidence back in the market, there will be less interest in gold so the value will fall and people who buy actual gold are going to be stuck holding the stocks for who knows how long until they rise this high again.

All the while these same rabbits will be unhappy at their falling value so will sell off, at a loss, and then bitch and moan that they missed their chance. they didn't miss the chance, they took the wrong bet. The actually miners are making the money, they sell it and don't hold it.

If you did have a lot of gold to unload, would raising uncertainty in the money market be feasible? Say leaking information about insider trading by a respected agency or a rouge trader from a powerful bank...

You could short sell Gold now to about 5-6 weeks in the future. Once those african mining companies get back to producing, then the price should swing back to its equilibrium, and you would have made a shit ton of money on the idiots who did buy it long.

...seems there's also profit to be made in mining MMORPG Gold as well...

online gold mining

Hmm... must write a run involving the subtle manipulation of the gold exchange for the above reasons...

CNBC was just talking about this. They said the stock of mining firms is way up, except for South African companies that are not able to get up to full production.